Anything related to hi-fi and sound reproduction from past, present, to future. Plus the humanitarian, environmental aspects of A / V consumer electronics manufacture and marketing.

Saturday, November 7, 2015

Vinyl Records: An Extraordinary Playback Medium?

Whether LPs or 45s, are vinyl records qualify as an
“extraordinary” musical playback medium due to their capacity to “alleviate”
screw-ups during the recorded music performance’s mastering stage?

By: Ringo Bones

Strange how those “wonderful” attributes of the analog vinyl
records – whether they be 33 1/3 LPs or 45s - that Stereophile magazine
columnist Michael Fremer had been describing about throughout the 1990s still
holds true today, well into the second decade of the 21st Century. With
the Marantz TT-15 turntable back in 2004 and the more recent Onkyo CP-1050
turntable, one would think that both SACD and 24-bit 192-KHz DVD Audio would
have consigned vinyl records to the “dustbin of history” during the first
decade of the 21st Century, unfortunately it didn’t. But what is it
about vinyl records that managed to raise “more mysticism” than even its own
2-channel analog master tape?

Chesky Records founder David Chesky once remarked that there
was something “magical” and inexplicable about the music generated by a stylus
coursing through a record groove. Is the magic we love about vinyl records,
whether they be 33 and 1/3 RPM LPs or 45 RPM singles, inherent in the analog
nature of record playback, or is it something added by that process that allows
vinyl records to create a sense of “reality” better than most commercially
available prerecorded music mediums and including its 2-channel analog master
tape? Or is it a combination of both?

In my own listening experience, I suspect it is mostly due
to how vinyl record playback cartridges – both moving magnet and moving coil –
make the vinyl record playback system like they are very transparent sounding
analog “dynamic range expanders” due to the way vinyl records tend to sound “more
dynamic” in side by side comparison to the first generation open reel copy of
the master tape. Given that some of the master tapes of oft-mentioned classic
pop rock studio albums recorded during the mid to late 1970s had been recorded
with a little too much compression that even though they are multi-track analog
studio recordings they sound as if they have that digital sound that Michael
Fremer rails against – i.e. everything gets flattened out – including dynamics.
Could the stylus and cantilever structure of a typical vinyl record playback
cartridge acting as a “corrective dynamic range expander” that makes some
over-compressed studio album recordings sound more natural on their vinyl pressing
versions in comparison to either open reel tape and CD, SACD or 24-bit 192-KHz
DVD Audio copies?